Hi All,
May this New Year be enjoyable and successful for all.
I have several goals for this New Year, mostly focusing on my career, but to start off I’ll be writing this blog and posting twice a week. Which will hopefully be a whole lot better than what it has been in the past. This first blog series is about how comic books and super heroes have influenced my career. This is also part of a Toastmasters assignment, “Writing a Compelling Blog,” which when the blog series is complete, I’ll be giving a speech about the whole experience.
Comic books and super heroes have been part of my life for, well nearly all my life. Now that I think about it, super heroes have been there long before comic books were. I’ll probably be giving away my age in this blog, but I have no problem with that.
There were several super heroes shows as part of Saturday Morning Cartoons on television at that time, most well-known of course was the Super Friends, but there were others before that. I would first discover super heroes elsewhere, starting with reruns of the 1950s Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves, and the 1960s Batman series starring Adam West. I think I enjoyed the Superman series better even if it was in black and white. I also enjoyed super heroes that I never saw, listening to the Green Hornet, Lone Ranger, and The Shadow on the radio (yes these were all reruns as well), and I enjoyed them almost more than the ones that appeared on television. Radio was the theatre of the mind; my young imagination created the worlds I heard. These radio heroes would end up playing an important part of my career down the road.
Comic books came into existence to me in an odd way. Why I had never read one up to this point I’m not really certain, though I suppose the comic book adaptions of Bible stories does count, but it’s not the same thing. Religion and how it relates to my love of comics will be in an upcoming blog account. However, I believe God had a hand in my love for comics from the very beginning.
The first comics I read I got while my grandparents were in the hospital. The gift shop sold digest sized comics, and one of them greatly interested me. This comic and the ones that followed, would be the start of everything that would follow. After that, I would be… well, I would be addicted to reading super hero comics.
I would be encouraged keep reading comics as it helped with my overall reading in school.
It wouldn’t be long after those first few comics that I would discover my favorite series to read; All-Star Squadron, and I would continue to read it until the end of the series years later. As reading comics helped improve my school reading, this series helped grow my interest in history. More on this later too.
From those early comics I read, I soon began to draw pictures. Copying some, and creating my own. It would take a lot of work, and a lot of years, but eventually I would become a professional comic book illustrator and a writer, and that all lead into the rest of my career.
Am looking forward to telling you all the crazy details of it all.
Hope you enjoy my new blog series, please comment and share.
Kevin Paul Shaw Broden
Four Names of Creativity